Handsome Furs: from Russia with love
The husband-and-wife team finds inspiration in Russian portable toilets. No, really.
Published March 10, 2009
When I call Handsome Furs, I'm not sure whether keyboardist Alexei Perry or guitarist and singer Dan Boeckner will pick up on the other end. The phone rings and Alexei greets me casually, but she passes the phone to Dan.
The band is together at the moment, but at the moment they're not a band. They're just husband and wife, who also happen to perform together as Handsome Furs. Although Dan has found more widespread recognition with his other band, Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs hits closer to home, he says. It's just him and his wife.
Last month the two launched a world tour in support of their second LP. The album is called Face Control, a term that comes from the Russian bar scene practice where partygoers will pay upwards of $5,000 to reserve a table at bars in Moscow, only to be turned away at the door if the bouncer doesn't like the way they look.
"There's a lot of ostentatious wealth going on in Moscow," Boeckner says. "We saw a lot of women in fur coats and really fancy designer outfits."
Despite all this prosperity though, the band was shocked by the ludicrously uneven distribution of wealth throughout the city.
"We were walking up (the street), and there were these teenagers or young women living in these portable toilets," he says. "The door to one of them was open, and you could see all of her personal belongings -- a gym bag filled with clothes. And that really shocked me, you know? It just shocked me. It was just so totally fucking brutal to have that contrasted with people cruising by with full-on designer outfits, out doing their shopping."
Seeing these harsh disparities firsthand informed the band's songwriting for Face Control, and the resulting album is a patchwork of pounding drum machines and tumultuous guitar with Russia at its heart.
The ever-prevalent guitar static and spacious drums are reminiscent of The Jesus and Mary Chain, a comparison that Boeckner takes in stride.
"They're a huge influence on me, especially their first record, Psychocandy," he says. "It's one of my all-time favorite records. I think it's fucking amazing. It's genius."
When I tell Boeckner that Face Control is definitely the catchier of the Handsome Furs' two albums, he disagrees, but he isn't surprised.
"I'm just generally wrong about the stuff that I make," he says. "You know, my opinion about it is usually just ass-backwards from what everybody else thinks. I thought this record was totally abrasive, and you know, not catchy."
But despite his protestations, "All We Want, Baby, is Everything" is underpinned by simple, springy guitar melodies that can't help but pop up hours and days after listening to the album. Meanwhile "Evangeline" is, ironically, bluesier than "Talking Hotel Arbat Blues," but both feature some of the most memorable vocal melodies that Boeckner has produced with either of his bands to date.
Although Perry and Boeckner spend a great deal of time together both as a band and as a married couple, they don't let their proximity get in the way.
"I guess in a way our personal and professional lives are kind of inseparable," Boeckner says. "We work on this band all the time at home. You know, we write songs at home, and we still have to do mundane shit like clean the house, but they never really bump up against each other."
In fact, despite the Furs' constant contact, he says there's more tension in Wolf Parade than Handsome Furs. Most of the guys in Wolf Parade, who are set to reconvene in October to work on album three, have been friends since just after high school, but Dan explains the difference between his bands bluntly.
"You know, I just don't have sex with anybody in Wolf Parade," he says. "And I'm not married to any of those guys."
While Boeckner admits there are plenty of conflicts of personality within his more celebrated band, it tends to work to their advantage.
"I got a little stressed out with the last Wolf Parade record from the fact that it took a lot longer than I wanted for it to come out," he says. "But, at the end of the day, I was kind of happy we waited on it."
Still, the stress is fleeting, he says, and most of the time he relishes in the fact that he has two bands.
"It just structures my life in general, and I think I'm the kind of person that needs that," Boeckner says. "I need to be doing something, otherwise shit gets kind of dark."